


you've really got a hold on me

by Springsteen



Series: open all night [12]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 00:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7382920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Springsteen/pseuds/Springsteen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of things worth noticing about Dex. What Nursey notices the most are his hands, and what he can do with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you've really got a hold on me

Though he might not say any of this to anyone, there are a lot of things Nursey likes about Dex. The brilliant shade of his hair. The way he never backs down from a fight. The jutting lines of his collarbone. His ability to constantly challenge Nursey. The way he looks in snapbacks. Nursey’s list goes on and on, but what Nursey likes about him the most are his hands, and what he can do with them. 

One morning before practice, Nursey watches Dex taping up his stick. He’s mesmerized by the methodical movement of Dex’s hands, a slow circular motion of constant tension as he winds the tape. Nursey knows he’s staring and absolutely doesn’t care, can’t bring himself to look away until Dex finishes, slapping his stick against the floor. 

Abruptly, Nursey realizes he’s going to be late - he’s only half changed, skates still unlaced as everyone else is ready to walk out to the ice. Still, he lets himself watch Dex slide his hands into his gloves, watches him flex his fingers beneath the padding. “Dude, hurry the fuck up,” Dex says, flicking Nursey’s shoulder as he walks past on his way out to the ice. Nursey is so late Hall and Murray make him stay after practice to skate suicides. He can’t even really be mad about it.

It might have been a little creepy, but Nursey liked watching Dex fix things. Whether he was working on an assignment for computer science, fingers flying across the keyboard faster than Nursey could even think, or if he was deftly twisting a wrench to fix the old bicycle Chowder had dragged across campus, Nursey could sit back and watch him for hours. It might have been more than a little creepy.

* * *

One day, Nursey walks into the kitchen of the Haus to find Dex sitting on the floor, Ransom and Bitty standing near him. One of the kitchen chairs is on the floor, one leg pulled out of the seat, the horizontal piece that attached it to the front leg snapped in half. “How did you even do this?” Dex asks, running his hands along the rest of the legs, looking for more damage.

“Um,” Holster says when Bitty glares at him. “Doesn’t matter. Can you fix it?”

Dex looks up at Holster, then back down at the chair, frowning. “It might be cheaper to just buy another chair,” he says slowly. 

“What do you need?” Nursey asks. Dex looks up at him, frowning.

“No,” Dex said, “You won’t know what to get.”

Nursey rolls his eyes. No matter what Dex or anyone else thinks, he’s not an idiot. So he’s not really capable of cooking things and he’s clumsy enough to break a lot of things accidentally. Growing up, his family has always had more money than he could even really understand. Whenever something broke, they replaced it, which he knows is a privilege a lot of people don’t have. Still, he doesn’t think that makes him a bad person, especially when he can use that privilege to help his teammates - his friends. “Just give me a list. I can’t fuck up a shopping list.”

Dex pushed himself up from the floor, a stretch of long limbs. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s go to Home Depot.”

Dex drives, arguing there’ll be more room for supplies in his beat-up old pickup. The interior is worn but clean, a pair of sunglasses hanging from the visor. “Don’t touch the radio,” Dex says when he starts the car. Predictably, classic rock pours from the speakers. Nursey spends the drive watching Dex drum his hands on the steering wheel, watches him blindly shift gears, easy as anything. Every time Dex rests his hand on the stick shift, Nursey things about reaching down and holding his hand, tangling their fingers together. Instead, he rolls down the window and leans his arm against it. 

He follows Dex around the store, asking if they need increasingly ridiculous things. “What about that?” he asks, pointing at a gigantic circular saw. “Do we need that?”

Dex drags Nursey away from the power tools. “Bro, what about a dishwasher!”

“I should’ve left you at the Haus,” Dex says, walking down an aisle full of hand tools. Dex picks up a bottle of wood glue and a long metal rod thing, both of which Nursey takes from him. 

“You didn’t get a cart,” Nursey explains.

“Yeah, you would’ve run it into something,” Dex says. 

“Would not,” Nursey says, turning a corner and nearly hitting Dex with the metal thing. “What even is this?”

“It’s a bar clamp,” Dex says, “For holding the chair together while it’s drying.”

“Huh,” Nursey says. “Wow, those are some ugly chairs. We need them.” Dex sighs and walks past all of the furniture without stopping to make fun of any of it. “You’re no fun to go shopping with,” Nursey says. 

Dex wasn’t even paying attention, running a hand along a shelf full of replacement chair pieces. He picks up a curved piece, holds it up for inspection, then sets it down before picking up another, simpler one. “That’ll work,” Dex mutters. “We’re done.”

“I still think we should get a dishwasher,” Nursey says as they walk to the cash registers. 

“We have one,” Dex says. “It’s the chore wheel. And you, if you still want Rans and Holster’s dibs.”

Nursey groans. Because he’s the one carrying everything, he also manages to pay for it before Dex can even pull his wallet out of his pocket. “You’re the one who’s actually gonna do the work,” Nursey says. “Let me at least do something.” Dex frowns but doesn’t say anything. Nursey considers it a win.

Back at the Haus, he sits in the backyard with Dex as he pieces the chair back together, humming to himself and sometimes holding his hand out so Nursey can hand him a different tool, like a doctor performing some bizarre operation. At one point, he gets out an honest-to-god hand saw to cut down the new piece for the chair. Nursey absolutely knows he’s staring and it’s really not chill to objectify Dex like this, but he just can’t help it. 

“Okay,” Dex says, brushing off his hands. “Good as new. Or, well, it’s not in pieces anymore.”

“Bro, you’re amazing,” Nursey says before he can stop himself. He wonders how mean it would be if he broke another chair, just to go through this whole process again.

Dex shrugs. “It’s not that hard or anything,” he says, like everyone can do basic carpentry and furniture repair. “Don’t touch it,” he says to Nursey.

“Dex, chill,” Nursey says. Dex groans and flops onto his back on the grass, and Nursey just laughs.

* * *

Nursey is honestly beyond surprised Dex agrees to come to the party at the art house. Lardo had invited them, but Nursey knows most of the people there, too, and knows they’re the kind of people Dex can’t stand. There are a bunch of loud theatre kids, sporadically bursting into song in the living room. Upstairs, a bunch of Lardo’s artist friends are smoking in somebody’s bedroom. He thinks somebody’s doing some sick body painting, or stick’n’poke tattoos, or something. He’s thinking about going up there and getting one, thinking about how mad Dex would be, the lecture he’d give about getting some kind of infection, when he realizes he hasn’t seen Dex in a while.

He wonders if Dex just got so annoyed he left, but he doesn’t think he’d leave without saying anything. He checks his phone - no texts from Dex, so he leaves the couple of girls trying to convince him to be a model for drawing classes to go find Dex. There’s different music playing in every room in the house, a confusing jumble of overlapping noise. Dex isn’t in the kitchen, where he finds Holster talking excitedly with some people from the a capella group. They break out into Aretha’s “Natural Woman” so loudly Nursey almost doesn’t hear the music coming from outside. 

He steps out onto the porch and promptly drops his drink on the ground. 

Dex is sitting on the steps with a small group of people. He’s plucking out notes on a guitar, eyes closed as he sings along. “I don’t like you, but I love you. Seems that I’m always thinkin’ of you…” His fingers move smoothly over the strings, perfect and unfaltering in their rhythm. Nursey’s heard him sing before, but he had no idea he could play guitar. He would tell him to do open mic nights if he thought there was any chance Dex would actually go for it. 

_“You do me wrong now, my love is strong now. You’ve really got a hold on me…”_

Someone says something to Dex, making him miss a couple notes and blush brilliantly. Dex mutters something Nursey doesn’t hear and hands the guitar to a girl who starts playing an Ed Sheeran song. Dex leans back, glances over his shoulder, and sees Nursey.

“I had no idea you could play like that,” Nursey says, sitting down next to Dex. He’s still blushing. Nursey wonders how much he’s had to drink, if he’s only comfortable enough to perform like this when he’s buzzed. 

“Yeah, well,” Dex says, picking up his drink from the ground by his feet. He takes a few sips and doesn’t say anything else.

“Why haven’t you played for the team or anything?” Nursey asks. 

Dex knocks his cup against his knee. “I don’t want to annoy anyone,” he says. 

Nursey stares at him. “Dex, that is the least annoying thing you could be doing,” he says. 

Dex snorts. “What a charmer,” he says, finishing his drink. “I’m gonna head out,” he says. “Have a good night.” He walks away before Nursey can offer to walk him back to his dorm, before Nursey can say anything at all. He can’t get Dex’s voice out of his head for days.

* * *

After a while, Nursey thinks he’s got this whole thing under control. He controls his staring, limiting himself to fleeting glances whenever he can get them. Dex starts a paper airplane war in the library as they’re studying, expertly folding paper with quick, sharp motions before hurling them down the table. Nursey’s airplanes are uneven and wobble as they fly, floating back to the table a few feet from Dex. Dex manages to land one of his planes right in Nursey’s hair. His whole face lights up when he laughs, grinning as he teaches Chowder his airplane-folding technique.

They fist-bump at practice whenever they nail a new or difficult play, and Nursey thinks about that contact without gloves, about skin to skin, about Dex’s pale fingers dotted with faint freckles. His eyes snap to Dex’s hand holding a door open, passing him an xbox controller, trying to steal a bite of pie. 

Of course it’s his own clumsiness that brings this whole sorry situation to the next level. They’re leaving the Haus to go to dinner when Nursey trips on one of the front steps. “Oh, shit,” he mumbles as he pitches forward, totally off balance. Dex turns just in time to catch Nursey, big hands wrapping tightly around his biceps.

Dex sighs. “How are you not this clumsy on the ice?” he asks.

“I’m so obsessed with your hands.” Nursey responds with the only thought that’s been running through his head for weeks, sounding completely creepy and insane. “Shit, that’s not, I mean. You have really nice hands. Uh.” Dex is staring at him, but he’s also still holding him up, still has his hands around Nursey’s arms. “You know what, just forget I said any-”

“You like my hands?” Dex repeats, incredulous. He looks down at his hand on Nursey’s arm, shifts his fingers slightly. 

What the hell, Nursey thinks. It’s not like he can make this any less weird. “I like the rest of you, too,” he says. 

“Really?” Dex asks. He sounds so surprised, like he hasn’t noticed Nursey staring at him, Nursey making up excuses to follow him on errands and trying to spend as much time together as possible. Like he didn’t think Nursey was being completely, transparently obvious.

“Yeah, really,” Nursey says. He’s still off-balance, still leaning into Dex’s grip, so he nearly falls when Dex moves his hand from Nursey’s arm to his face.

“You’re so clumsy,” Dex says.

“’Cuz I’m always falling for you,” Nursey says. 

Dex stares at him. “I don’t know if I want to kiss you anymore,” he says. When Nursey wraps his arms around his waist, he smiles.

“You totally do,” Nursey says. 

“Yeah, I do,” Dex says softly, leaning in to kiss him. It’s better than Nursey even expected, a slow burning all the way to his toes. They kiss almost lazily, like there’s nothing Dex would rather do than stand out on the sidewalk making out with Nursey. Dex slides his hand down to Nursey’s neck, pushes his fingers into his hair. Nursey knows he’s going to be even more distracted by Dex’s hands now, thinking about all the other things Dex can do with them.


End file.
